Dr. Mark Behlke joined IDT as a Research & Development (R&D) consultant in 1995, was named Vice President and head of R&D in 1996, and was appointed Chief Scientific Officer in 2013. In 26 years at IDT, Mark directed research programs and new product development in the areas of DNA thermodynamics, gene synthesis, probe chemistry, qPCR, NGS, antisense, RNA interference, and CRISPR genome editing. 

In 2021 Dr. Behlke stepped down as head of R&D and transitioned to a half-time role as scientific advisor for IDT and the Danaher Life Sciences group. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of nucleic acid technologies and an inventor on more than 60 issued US Patents and an author on over 140 scientific papers.

Dr. Behlke holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, after doing his doctoral dissertation in the field of Immunogenetics. He completed an Internal Medicine residency at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and an Endocrinology Fellowship at the Longwood/Harvard program. Dr. Belhke was a Howard Hughes Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Genetics at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT.